Tag: Kin Lane

Replied to Posting a Message Nobody Reads by Kin Lane (Kin Lane)

Why do we post messages with text, images, and video online? Do we do it for attention? Do we do it to help educate and inform others? There are many positive and not so positive reasons we post messages online. I do not think many people publish text, images, or video online without intending to influence and communicate with one or many other human beings. I do it to get my ideas out of my head. I do it because I like crafting stories, and having a real or perceived audience helps with this process.

My choice to change my habits in regards to social media and sharing has really led me to reflect why I do what I do. What I have come to realise is that at the heart of it, I share in my own space for me. With this in mind, I like your point about ‘getting things out of your head’.
Bookmarked On the temptation to nuke everything and start over | Open Thinkering by Doug Belshaw (Open Thinkering | Doug Belshaw's blog)

A thank you to Audrey Watters and Kin Lane, and a reminder that everything is temporary.

Influenced on Kin Lane’s decision to leave the past behind, Doug Belshaw reflects on the temptation to start over. It is interesting to think about this alongside the debates about the end of forgetting. I wonder if it is really possible to nuke the past? Although we can make it more difficult, there are still traces, whether it be pieces saved within the Internet Archive or others cached around the web. I feel that nuking is the wrong approach, rather it is about what we make intentionally private and public. I just wonder if I also have a part to play by making the various links and references private as well?
Liked Leaving the Past Behind | Kin Lane (Kin Lane)

Here, in May of 2021, after almost fifteen years of posting here, I would say that I have reached a milestone in my personal development, achieving a peace of mind where I don’t feel like I need to process much more from the past. Sure, I am guessing there will be the occasional topic that emerges from the woodworks, but for the most part I am beyond processing the craziness from my past and I am looking towards the future. With this in mind I am going to reboot Kin Lane, flush the 14 years of blog posts, and begin with a blank canvas. I will keep everything I have written, but will be rebooting this blog with an eye towards what is next and not about what has been.

Liked I Was Never Good At Anything Until API Evangelist | Kin Lane (Kin Lane)

You see, my whole identity is wrapped up in the world of APIs, and while most of the time I am fine with that, I find myself in these moments feeling that I need much more than just performing in this online production, and where I always get stuck is with the reality that other than API Evangelist I really haven’t been good at anything in my life—I have been pretty much stuck in mediocre white guy mode.

Bookmarked Performing For, Evolving, Diversifying, and Expanding The People in My Circle (kinlane.com)

As you seek out new ideas, and open your mind to other possibilities, others begin to see you as a threat to the lifestyle they have always known. For me, I am just growing more righteous in what is acceptable or unacceptable around me, and the people I love. For me, it is essential that I continue to keep moving forward for the rest of my life, ever expanding the circle of people I am exposed to, and making sure I empathize and give space to other voices and ideas—-not simply clinging to what I know, or what was handed down to me as part of childhood.

Kin Lane reflects upon his effort to expose himself to people of different backgrounds, including people of colour and voices beyond his childhood upbringing. He explains that so much of it is deciding whether to be a part of the performance or being in the audience.

I believe in the value of the individual, and the importance of me being a free and independent thinker, but I believe in freedom and equality, not just freedom. I am not under any delusion that my thoughts and actions aren’t influence by those around me, and every one of my actions is being shaped by the world around me. The stories I read on and offline influence my thinking. The people I let into my life all influence my behavior, and everything I do each day is part of a performance for the people who know me. I would say that the independent individual part of all of this is really about who I let into my circle and be either part of the performance or join the audience.

This feels like it touches on a lot of Douglas Rushkoff’s work, whether it be Program or be Programmed or Team Human’s effort to find the other.

Replied to Divorce, Work, Mental Illness, and Being Human (kinlane.com)

As demonstrated by this post, the most important tool in my toolbox over the last decade has been writing. Writing on API Evangelist has helped me navigate the tech landscape, and writing here on Kin Lane has helped me navigate, well, me. Sometimes it just helps me put things down so that I can think through it all. I still haven’t figured out why I do the public blogging part of it. I know some of my posts here on Kin Lane make people cringe, but it is some strange part of the formula for me. I find the public performance of it all, and sharing of my challenges out in the open very therapeutical, but it isn’t something I would recommend for everyone, because there is definitely a backlash from it. However, the writing is very much a part of getting the voices out of my head and out into the open so that I can force them to make more sense to me, but hopefully also help me be more coherent in my engagements with others.

Thank you so much for sharing so openly Kin. It is truly a case of writing as empathy for others and yourself I guess.
Liked All I Can Say Is We Need to Give More Hope to the Young People (kinlane.com)

We have to get to work fixing our broken foundation, and making sure future generation won’t have to deal with all of our baggage around race, gender, and the environment. Allowing musicians like Shannon to make music without slowly killing themselves, and providing opportunities around fashion or cooking for people like the kid, giving our children the opportunity find themselves while centering their lives around something they love to do.

Liked A Drone Recovery Post to Remember the Kid – Drone Recovery (dronerecovery.org)

Once you enter the drone recovery program, there is no leaving it. It just takes several crash and burn outings before you get the hang of it, and can navigate this insane reality we just shared. It took me a number of crash and burns before I had the scars I needed to navigate this craziness. You have to have scars you can’t see or remember. They are the ones you just feel and know. I am guessing your life will leave a powerful scar that will help you through the next mission. Just know that you made a mark. I won’t forget you, and since your mother is is so damn stubborn and going to live to be a hundred, I have to outlive her by at least a couple days. She’s endured too much death for me to go first. Anyways, I’ll be thinking about you all that time. Later bro!

Liked In Technology Everything Is A Problem Except For Technology | Kin Lane (Kin Lane)

In the API economy everything is a problem that needs solving with an API. Need to get access to your accounting information? Use an API! Want your car to be more fuel efficient? Use an API! Want to water your house plants while away? Get an API! If there isn’t a real problem there, make one up, and create an API for it. Repeat until you find a problem, and a solution that will generate enough revenue to keep the lights on, and investors showing up at your door. APIs are behind almost every technosolutionism fantasy of the Internet age—both good and bad.

Bookmarked Feeling Sad For Those Who Gave Away Their Authorship To Medium | Kin Lane (Kin Lane)

I am glad I didn’t go all in with Medium. I may have gotten more page views at the peak, but I think over time the long tail will be greater within my own domain. I am also feeling the same thing about Google lately. I used to cater to the SEO games, but after a couple of algorithm changes I haven’t been able to keep up, and my numbers are half of what they used to be. I find my time is better spend focusing on learning about the interesting things across the API sector, and writing a steady stream of stories, than it is tweaking the knobs and dials of the SEO beast. Google has become an ad engine, and I’m not in the business of generating revenue from ads, so it really doesn’t make sense for me to be playing that game full time.

Kin Lane reflects on his decision to persist on his own domain, rather than moving to Medium.
Liked Hindsight 2020 | Kin Lane (Kin Lane)

I went into this last decade as a believer and came out the other end a cautious skeptic. This is a difficult place to find yourself in as an evangelist for a ubiquitous technology. It isn’t that I don’t believe in the power of technology anymore, it is just that the potential for abuse and explication within human hands is just too great to ignore anymore. After watching the Twitter and Facebook APIs fuck with our world so heavily in the last decade I am left questioning if I should be doing this at all. APIs aren’t good, bad, or even neutral. APIs are purely a reflection of their creators and operators. In the last decade APIs are being used for more harm than they are good, and the favorite tool for inflicting a lot of mediocre unsecured technology that doesn’t really care about the humans they are purportedly serving.

Bookmarked Intro To APIs: What Is An API? by Kin Lane (blog.getpostman.com)

APIs are not a specific service or tool from a company, they are just like the web, but instead of getting HTML back with each request, you get JSON, XML, and CSV – providing structured, machine-readable information that can be used by other systems and within other applications with very little assistance from a human.

In his first official post as Chief Evangelist at Postman, Kin Lane (aka API Evangelist) provides a post starting at the beginning by defining what is meant by ‘API’:

APIs are how data is exchanged, content is published, media is consumed, and algorithms are applied across the web today. APIs are how you access your social data, your photos, your accounting information, and much, much more.

Along with posts from Ben Werdmuller, Tom Woodward, Alan Levine, as well as API Evangelist’s history of APIs, these posts provide a useful introduction to the world of APIs.

Liked The Behavioral Surplus From Me Reading My RSS Feeds | Kin Lane (Kin Lane)

I wanted to take a moment to understand what some of the surplus data that is generated from me just reading my RSS feeds for about an hour in my Feedly web application:

  • Subscribe To – Every time I subscribe to an RSS feed, this information is added to my profile use later.
  • How Long – How much time I put into cultivating feeds is a default part of surplus data being generated.
  • Click and Read – Everything I click on and read adds a layer of behavioral surplus to be extracted.
  • Tag and Organize – Everything I tag and organize shares my approach to taxonomy and understanding.
  • Share With Others – The tags I turn into feeds and share continue painting a picture of what matters.

When you take these behavioral data points and multiply them by a couple thousand feeds, and hundreds of thousands of individual blog posts, GitHub updates, and Tweets that I subscribe to via my Feedly, it can paint a pretty relevant, real-time portrait of what Kin Lane is thinking about.

Liked What Is An Application? | API Evangelist (API Evangelist)

My view of what an application is stems from a decade of studying the least visible, and least tangible aspect of an application, its programming interface. When talking to people about applications, the first question I ask folks is usually, “do you know what an API is”? If someone is API savvy I will move to asking, “when it comes to application programming interface (API), who or what is being programmed? Is it the platform? The application? Or, is it the end-user of the applications?” I’ve spent a decade thinking about this question, playing it over and over in my end, never quite being satisfied with what I find. Honestly, the more I scratch, the more concerned I get, and the more I’m unsure of exactly what an “application” is, and precisely who are what is actually being programmed.

Liked I Do Not Own Kin Lane | Kin Lane (Kin Lane)

Audrey said something profound the other day which stuck with me. As we were talking about data and data ownership, she stated that, “I do not own me”—-pushing back on a common narrative around data ownership. Highlighting that conversations around the ownership of data are merely a dispossession vehicle for getting us to buy into concepts that you can own people. Muddying the water, and ultimately helping reducing humans to transactions. A photo taken by me or of me is not owned by me. It is me. There is no ownership of my physical or digital self. There is only me. I do not care if you’ve managed to digitally reduce a piece of me to a transaction, it is still me.

Liked The Web Will End Up Being Just Like Automobiles | Kin Lane (Kin Lane)

In my mind, the web will end up being just like automobiles. Everywhere. Dominating our life. Believing we can’t live without. While also polluting, destroying our environment, health, impacting our physical lives, but yet we will keep doubling down. Everyone keeps declaring that Internet technology is inevitable and will just keep marching forward, with endless innovations just off on the horizon. Perpetually looking forward, rather than ever pausing for a moment to look at the state of things. And, like commuters isolated I our automobiles, we will never truly acknowledge just how shitty this technology has actually made our lives, and refuse to ever accept there is any other to live.